Earth is on pace to set a record as the hottest year ever recorded, crossing the critical 1.5ºC threshold. The Copernicus Climate Change Service arm of the European Union, charged with tracking global increases in temperature, said that 2024 will be 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels, a first for the world breaching a key threshold written into the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
After 10 months of 2024, it is virtually certain that this year will be the hottest on record and the first to surpass 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels according to the ERA5 dataset," said Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). "This is a new landmark in global temperature history and should motivate further ambition toward the upcoming Climate Change Conference COP29.
The chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, Liz Bentley, told the BBC that this new record was a timely reminder for governments at COP29 of how urgent action was needed to prevent further warming.
The EU agency announced that countries all over the world are gathering in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the 29th Conference of the Parties. According to the ERA5 dataset, in 2024, the global average temperature was 1.55 degrees Celsius above the 1.48 degrees threshold recorded in 2023. The report also narrowed down some of the dramatic weather in 2024 propelled by climate change, including severe flooding in Spain and the rapid melting of Antarctic sea ice.
As atmospheric scientist Dr. Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology, told Salon in an interview in August, a rise above that 1.5 degree Celsius threshold would be disastrous.
"A year above 1.5 degrees Celsius is unprecedented in human history," said Caldeira. "But it's important to recognize that every emission of carbon dioxide adds to global warming, and each avoided emission reduces that warming.
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